Finding the balance between speed, future-proofing, and empathy

Main Takeaways

• Blend a passion for the user’s real-world context with a methodical approach to problem-solving.
• Embrace the tension between short-term delivery and long-term vision by “thinking big, building small.”
• Keep product discovery continuous with a mix of automated feedback monitoring and deeper qualitative research.
• Bring skeptics on board by visually articulating your vision and pre-empting potential objections with clear data.
• Foster a culture of experimentation by lowering the pressure on ideas: “Let’s just try it and learn what happens.”

Who are you in a nutshell? What do you do, and why do you do it?

I’m Nick Schweitzer, Staff PM at Strava. I started my tech journey about 8 years ago when I founded Metadrift, a visual search engine for video archives. This morphed into Klydo, a machine learning tool for user researchers to automate the analysis of user feedback, unfortunately before LLMs were a thing. We raised venture capital, grew the team, and acquired some big customers. After five years of running my own company, I decided to broaden my experience, which is when I started my official PM career. I worked at Slite and then at Intercom before landing my dream job at Strava.

At Strava, I lead the Maps team. We’re responsible for every map you see in the Strava product. I took this role because it aligns with my love of the outdoors, exploration, and being active. Strava’s mission is to motivate people to get out there and be active. It’s refreshing to work on a product that benefits when people go outside to run, ride, or hike, not when they spend time glued to their screens.

What’s your setup? What tools, frameworks, and products do you use? Where do you work, and how is your schedule?

I’m fully remote, working from my home in Oxford. Strava has an office in London, so I often go in to socialize and go for runs with the team. As you’d expect, there’s a big running culture here. With much of Strava in San Francisco, my day typically starts later and stretches into the early evening to accommodate calls. The upside is that my early mornings are protected time for trail running in the muddy hills around Oxford.

I’m a huge Notion fan for my notes and to-dos, and I love Excalidraw for brainstorming. A PM’s job is all about distilling complex ideas into simple diagrams, and forcing myself to draw them is a great way to clarify my thinking.

What’s the biggest challenge for you at the moment, and how do you plan to overcome it?

A big challenge I’ve faced in every organization is finding the right balance between shipping quickly and building for the future. Interestingly, this tension exists at all company sizes. Everyone feels pressure to deliver short-term value. There’s no silver bullet, but a product principle from a previous company, “Think big, build small”, really helped. At the design stage (where work is cheap), you go wild with your vision of how to holistically solve the user problems. Then, when it comes to actually building (where work is expensive), you only implement the smallest standalone piece. This means defining scope after doing the design, not before.

In your opinion, what defines a top 1% product management professional?

The best PMs are amazing storytellers. They can articulate a user problem in a crisp, visual, and emotive way, then craft a vision for solving it. Their storytelling secures buy-in from the team and leadership. At the end of the day, a PM doesn’t create Figma prototypes or write code. Their job is to inspire others to do that work, and telling a compelling story is the best way to make it happen.

How do you consistently identify high-impact opportunities that others might overlook?

It sounds obvious, but you have to live and breathe your users’ problems. This means making them as real as possible. Any interview where a user simply talks about their issues is almost useless. The real insights come when they show you what they do, ideally in as real a context as possible. Screen sharing is your friend here. When users demonstrate their real-life workflow or workaround, you uncover the pain points that truly matter.

How do you approach balancing speed and agility in product development with thorough research and validation?

I’ve realized speed and thorough validation don’t have to conflict. One tactic I used a lot at previous B2B companies was co-building. Pick a small number of customers in your ideal profile and iterate quickly with them from problem definition to prototyping. Upfront research points you in the right direction, but no amount of research can truly validate your solution until you put a working prototype in their hands to see if it actually helps.

What systems or habits do you use to ensure that product discovery remains continuous?

Tools for monitoring user feedback are pretty good these days (I would know, I spent five years building one). They collect app reviews, support tickets, Reddit posts, and more, synthesizing them into themes. But even with advanced ML, it remains relatively surface-level. You still need deeper qualitative feedback: actually chatting with users. That’s how you get to the real underlying insights.

How do you present your product vision to skeptical stakeholders, and what do you do to maintain alignment over time?

This is where Excalidraw shines. I force myself to draw my vision first, not just write it down. People can’t buy into something they don’t understand. A good test is whether a stakeholder can sum up your vision to someone else and land the same points. Then, I pre-empt pushback by focusing on how we’ll overcome potential challenges, often with data or evidence.

Alignment over time comes from setting clear goals that flow from the vision. Whether you use OKRs or another framework, there should be a direct link between your strategy and your goals. Tracking these goals keeps everyone on board and aligned.

How do you cultivate a culture of experimentation in your team, and what practices have been most effective in driving innovation?

Whether you’re proposing a new product idea or a new way of working, the best approach is: “Let’s just try it and learn what happens. We can always revert or change to something else.” This removes the pressure for the idea to be perfect from the start, and you don’t need to convince everyone it will definitely work. You simply let the trial reveal whether it’s a good idea. That mindset significantly reduces friction and fosters innovation.